I had written up, longhand, comparisons between the tactics of the current campaign and the pivotal campaigns at the end of the ancient Roman republic. Then, I started the new job (earning half what I earned previously, but more than I would earn outsourcing myself to India to remain in that profession), and my notes disappeared in the upheaval. Now, after watching the first Kerry-Bush debate, I'll attempt some thoughts.
Previously I posited that human nature remains the same, especially over such a short expanse of time as a few thousand years. People from similar cultures trend toward similar reactions in similar times. This has been why the study of Ancient Rome fascinates me; not just the study of its battles and statesmen, but the study of its personal and domestic life; not just its great works of literature and its aqueducts and arenas, but its small works of everyday life and tenements and family farms. The face of its common people, and, important in these times, the lurching, surging stumble of its nation from monarchy to republic to dictatorship.
Looking back on all this history, one might find it interesting the current Republican campaign has brought up Cicero's name. I believe they are quite familiar with his work. Perhaps Bush studied ancient Rome at Yale.
The Kerry-Bush election might make a good story in two thousand years, portrayed by the Richard Burtons and Rex Harrisons and Roddy McDowalls of the day. It doesn't have to be another two thousand years before we learn to learn from history.
The Republic
Literallyand Romans were literal peoplethe republic is the Public Thing, the people's state. It was a bold experiment to be undertaken by a group of cities previously held together by the force of a tyrant, and it was much more like our own republic than what the city-state of Athens achieved through its partial democracy. Rome's republic began on much the same sort of inspiration as ours. Romans, like the founding fathers in the United States, were well educated in the history of the Greeks, whose culture Romans held in similar regard even though the world was far less "ancient" then. Rome was partially an outgrowth of that culture, stirred into a melting pot of many different tribes and an assortment of languages. Romans skimmed out the best of everything in the melting pot; they survived through resilience; they squashed the population of Italy into a semi-homogeneous single entity and ranfresh-faced and youthful and as new as Americaamok.
By the time of Julius Caesar, Rome's "greatest generation" had seen an international war that catapulted the nation to preeminence as a military and technological superpower. It had faced crises of class struggle, and its centuries-old self identity as a nation who had conquered a new land through unwavering core values of hard work, hard religion, integrity, and grave sobriety was, many felt, wavering under the influence of outside ideas from other (and often older) cultures. A variety of religions bloomed. Free expression began to become free. The poor flocked to cities for urban-based services. Women got uppity. Households installed indoor plumbing. Citizens relied on imported goods for luxuries and necessities and fuelwhich, in the ancient world, usually meant slave-power.
The Candidates
But, on to Kerry and Bush. I mean, to Marcus Antonius and Octavian aka Augustus Caesar. Young Antonius had been a protégé of Julius Caesar. His keen eye recognised the shifting of power in Rome. He was ambitious, but his family's ties were closer to the "common man" than to the wealthy elitethe Antonii were, even after several generations, still considered rather nouveau riche. The famous incident in which Antonius offered a festival crown to Julius Caesar as part of a holiday celebration may well not have been intended to please the crowd or to give Caesar an opportunity to turn down absolute power, but to warn the public. Not warn the entrenched men in the senate house, but warn the citizens in the street that a dictator was growing in their midst, the same as the tyrants they had overthrown a few centuries past. Caesar was smart enough to know how to play the situation. He turned down the makeshift crown and postponed being declared dictator for a private Senate session. The date for that was set for the ides of March, andyou may have heard the rest of that story.
Kerry
Who was this Antonius, when he wasn't being portrayed by Richard Burton? (A fine choice for the role, although a Colm Meaney would be a more accurate physical model.) He was well educated, multilingual, a skilled orator from a family of rhetoricians, a writer. He was wealthy, athletic, and informed enough to make a priority of restoring the Library of Alexandria after the disastrous fire started by Caesar's soldiers. He was a charismatic, decorated war veteran, beloved by his men, who had shown uncompromising valour in the field; then, as many men of good families would, he returned to launch a senatorial career, aiming for what was, at that time, Rome's highest office, the two-man tag-team of Consul. He had seen the world, saw firsthand how its cultural machinery worked, had lived and learned. Like folk hero (even then) Alexander the Great, he understood the value of other countries and cultures; like Alexander, he did not account for the wrath of threatened parochialism.
He had troublesome intelligent wives, and chose forthright confident women as his partners. Octavia (Octavian's sister), the political marriage that was amicable enough that Octavia did not turn on her husband, shared space on the coins he minted, her portrait alongside his own.
Eventually, of course, he married a foreign wife, an African-born woman of the sort of vasty wealth Romans admired among their own kind who, as it happens, was the widow of a powerful senator.
The Younger Bush
Who was this Octavian, when he wasn't being channelled by Machiavelli and Bill Gates? (All right, that's just my personal opinion; and, by the way, Roddy McDowall played him in that Richard Burton movie; Rex Harrison was Caesar.) He was a son of privilege who previously had done little of note, who was so breezily disregarded when he arrived on the scene he had to take on the same name as his famous father to lend himself credibility. Given a command, he surrounded himself with men of reputation and generally followed the guidance of others; with them he cooperated with Antonius to do the work of stitching back a country at the frayed edge of civil war after the assassination of Julius Caesar. Octavian was given the position of Consul (part of the two-man tag team) to bring Caesar's powerful name back before the people and ease the nation past an increasingly bloody crisis, then later claimed this as part of his illustrious résumé.
Shedding, or, rather, pretending to shed a life of run-of-the-mill dissolution, he positioned himself on the pillar of moral rectitude, declaring what Rome really needed was a return to, and legislation of, any moral value that appealed to the extreme conservative group. Unable to base his campaign on his on shaky meritswhich mainly consisted of his family name and warm feelings toward the uncle who adopted himhe turned instead on his former ally, and piece by piece tore the opposition apart. He ripped out the threads that had been mended, Rome had its civil war, and the Republic died.
How Did Octavian Win?
After fence-sitting for some time and publicly insulting Octavian, one of the greatest attack-machine propagandists the world will ever know planted himself wholeheartedly in the Octavian camp. The arch-conservative (but with his own speckled life) Cicero (you'll have heard his name tossed around before the Kerry-Bush debate) launched a smear campaign of exaggerations, outright lies, and innuendo about events dating back to Antonius' adolescence (I'm not saying he was, you know, involved in the homosexual lifestyle, but why did he hang around with that fellow who everyone knows was awell, I shouldn't even mention it. Plus, I heard he threw up in the Senate privy once... a rhetorical device known as Bogus Blathering). Marcus Antonius fought back with good humourfor a while. I leave it to the interested student to research the punishment meted out to Cicero when Octavian literally sold out his Karl Rove. Cicero may have been gone, but the attack machine had been built.
Octavian's hollow attempts to live up to his famous (but one-term, so to speak) dad resulted in a false and furious moralising, but it resonated with the Romans, who fancied themselves the moral authorities of the world, an upright people whose examples of personal responsibility, free trade, and military might made them the apex to which all other nations must aspire. Octavian's own indiscretions either did not play well as propaganda, or were not exploited vehemently by the Antonius spin-team, or the record of them has been so thoroughly erased we are missing some of the counterattack. Today we find scattered remnants of Antonius' campaign of ideas against the opposition's campaign of prejudice and fear. Evidence remains in scanty contemporary accounts, but many of the surviving pieces of Antonius' campaign show pro-Antonius argument rather than anti-Octavian attack. The rest, and Marcus Antonius' books, were banned, and burned.
Peace (sort of) in Israel
For a time, as mentioned previously, the two men cooperated (they formed a triumvirate, three-man council, but the reality was two power players and a third man with a very large bag of money). While Antonius travelled the world, taking on responsibility for the more difficult half of Rome's sphere of influence, forging alliances, negotiating peace in Israel, Octavian took the opportunity at home in Rome to point out Antonius' scurrilous behaviour: This man likes foreigners. He speaks other languages. He cannot be trusted. Maybe he isn't even a war hero. Have you seen how he behaves with that ritzy woman who speaks all those fancy languages too?
Antonius' errors were both outrageously Clinton-esque and ironically Kerry-esque. There were the lapses in romantic judgement; there was the acknowledgement of a world beyond the confines of his own country. Not everyone opposed this global outlook; half the Senate literally followed him. In the end, he was the more sober man, the man of greater Roman gravitas in spite of the slanders, the one who recognised his country's place in the world. He was the one who had the experience to wage and win difficult battles, who knew when to pull away from a war that had become untenable in the middle east. In the end, bad advice and the ruthless division of his country into fiercely opposed camps brought down the man who may have been better for the Republic.
Antonius had one particularly soft spothis children. (I believe there's a story about him fishing the family pet dormouse out of the Tiber, but... that may be apocryphal.) By the time the fighting was over, most of those children had been sent away (to disappear in short order) or worse. In a shrine to Caesar that Octavian himself had declared a place of sanctuary, he ordered Antonius' young son murdered. (See my young-adult novel on the subject. Whenever I finish it.) The history written to please Octavian portrayed him as wise, compassionate, moderate, and moral. The truth hidden under the marble statues and great edifices and praise poems is a sticky mess of cruelty.
The destiny of the Roman Republic was ultimately sealed in a battle where Octavian used the state-of-the-art ships Antonius had had built for his former friend in happier days. There's still an opportunity to decide between our own Antonius and Octavian by vote instead of violence.
What Will Happen Next
Octavian's various patria acts, measures touted as necessarily draconian to protect the Republic in its time of struggle, became permanent and removed power inexorably from the Senate into the growing executive branch and toward the military. In exchange for short-term personal gain, the senators who sided with Octavian bought themselves an emperor they could no longer control. In exchange for promises of veteran benefits that were not always possible to fulfill, the military took their payment by taking control. Within a generation it would be the military who, through mere force of arms, determined the succession of power.
Both good and terrifyingly corrupt emperors followed over the subsequent centuries, a long, slow rotting process as Rome splintered and finally dissolved. It took a very long time before the final remnants were scattered, dragging down much of the surrounding world into a loss of hard-earned technological and artistic advancement. Although the pace of events in these modern centuries is much faster, we ourselves might even last one or two hundred years of slow decay.
The problem with letting your Republic die, though, is that it's a coin toss whether the emperor you personally live under is a Marcus Aurelius or a Caligula.